Thursday, March 7, 2013

Are Drone Critics Mis-Firing? Why the War of Terror Should be Our Target

President Obama has a tested strategy
for dealing with a certain critic—the type who is fixated with a point on which
they can be easily proven wrong.He lets
them get worked up into a frenzy about a comparatively narrow issue.They’ll feverishly demand clarification, and
he’ll prevaricate in the provision of that clarification, letting them begin
slavering and foaming about the mouth and declaring their point the most
fundamental thing for humanity since Jesus Christ wrote that corporations were
people or words to that effect.

Then he casually undercuts them, turning
their treasured issue into a dead letter.He did this with the birthers.The latest victim of this move was Senator Rand Paul, who filibustered
the nomination of John Brennan to the post of CIA director, demanding
information about the ability of the President to conduct drone strikes against
Americans within the United States.Paul
had gone out on a limb, like Napoleon into Russia, staking no small part of his
reputation on the idea that he was about to wrench some horrific revelation
from the White House.

But then winter set in, and when the
Attorney General sent out a letter saying that the answer to Paul’s question is
“no”, the administration did so in a manner calculated
to make Paul look like a silly (and incidentally un-Presidential) blow-hard
who’d got himself all worked up about something unnecessarily.

Paul was the most immediate casualty,
but I hope, in the parlance of our national security apparatus, that the
anti-war movement (such as it is) does not suffer collateral damage from this
move.

Because while I think that Paul was
right to raise the issue, the manner in which he did so (and I’ll leave others
to speculate about why he chose this approach) is representative of the broader
manner in which critics of the administration’s national security policy have
repeatedly got themselves hung up on narrow and ultimately futile points,
unable to see the forest (our war of terror) for the trees (narrow questions
about the application of drones).

I saw some of this in a piece
in the Christian Science Monitor
written by Megan Braun, a friend and fellow UC Irvine alum who is currently
a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.Braun has
done extensive work on U.S. drone policy, and is probably one of the people best
versed in the ins and outs of that policy as it has evolved since it emerged
during the Bush years.Her essential (and
as far as I know, novel) argument is that part of the perniciousness associated
with drones stems from their institutional headquarters in the Central
Intelligence Agency.Although the
military has also used drones, their application in South Asia and elsewhere
has been “perfected” as it were by the CIA.

Braun argues that culturally and structurally,
the military is more accountable and amenable to transparency than the CIA, and
that data show that the military’s use of drones has been less sanguinary than
when those same weapons are used by the CIA.It’s an incisive, well-researched piece, and I would have expected
nothing less knowing Braun and having heard her in January discuss the research
on which the article was based.The
basic point is compelling.

But, in common with much writing on drones
and on the war of terror, there are some serious unquestioned premises and
unasked questions which I think are far more fundamental than the comparatively
narrow point about killing people in an accountable manner.

For example, take the following: “As America
enters the next decade of the fight against Al Qaeda, strategic and ethical
considerations require that the government refocus its attention on high-level
leaders, avoid civilian casualties, and remain accountable to the American
public.To do so, it needs to capitalize
on the military’s superior expertise, relative transparency, and overall
effectiveness by giving the Pentagon command of all armed drone operations”.

Should we in fact be entering a second
decade of the fight against Al Qaeda?

To what extent can we call
locally-dissatisfied “insurgents”, many with grievances that have next to
nothing to do with the United States and are directed primarily at their home
governments, “Al Qaeda”?

To what extent has the U.S. been taken
for a sucker by not asking these questions, and being used by authoritarian
regimes as a security procurer when those regimes label their domestic
opponents “Al Qaeda” affiliates, uncontested claims which are lapped up by our
intelligence agencies and military?

How much serious oversight will it be
possible to have irrespective of the institution overseeing the use of drones,
given that the President has declared drone wars non-wars?That is, in Afghanistan, where we also have
an army on the ground, Congress can request that information be made
public.But in Somalia, Yemen, Libya and
elsewhere, the administration has “disappeared” its wars and the violence they
sow precisely because they are drone
wars.

Is it time that we dispensed with the
fiction that it is possible to wage an “ethical” war?I would hope that most of us would recognise
that wars are by their very nature horrific, brutal things, offensive to the humanity
which is sometimes all that binds our fraught world, and that their dreadful nature
is why they must be undertaken only as a last resort.Something which can be described as “ethical”
is, in contrast, something which may be undertaken much more casually.

Would “transparency” of the sort
championed by Brennan make any of these supposedly-desirable outcomes an iota
more likely?Is transparency not a red
herring for all those concerned either with either morality or security as embodied
in the U.S. war of terror?

What on earth does it mean when Brennan
says, “I think the rule should be that if we’re going to take actions overseas
that result in the deaths of people, the United States should take
responsibility for that”.Does this mean
prosecuting those who incite and wage wars of aggression which lead to crimes
against humanity?Does this mean going
after those who murder people by means of signature strikes gone awry?Does this mean signing up to international
agreements which would make the U.S. subject to the same international norms
which it is happy to use to assail its “enemies” while insisting on its own
exemption?

Can we take Brennan seriously when he
talks up his own desire for transparency when he admitted to sitting on his
hands while working for a CIA which used torture as an intelligence gathering
tool?His explanation was that he was
outside of the chain of command, a chilling, infuriating remark which automatically
disqualifies Brennan in my mind and gives the lie to his claim to the moral
high ground.

What is the point of describing
technology as having the capacity to “be” proportionate and discriminate when what
matters is the administrative apparatus, personnel matrix, or culture in which
that technology is embedded?This is one
question that Braun begins to address, but the fact remains that the decisions
which call for the use of any killing technology—drones or any other—are taken
at a level which bureaucratic shuffling doesn’t affect.

Is it not time that we dispensed with
euphemisms like “collateral damage” when what we are actually referring to are
state murders—murders which go unpunished—in the name of national security?

Empirically, when we have a scenario in
which “U.S. military drones operating in Afghanistan fired 294 weapons in 2011,
but only one incident caused civilian deaths [where] in that same year, up to
11 out of 73 CIA drone strikes in Pakistan killed civilians”, can we be sure
that the difference in numbers could not be accounted for the kind of strikes
the CIA was undertaking, strikes which, if they are deemed necessary to
security or for political purposes, would presumably continue to be taken by
whomever controlled the drone force?

Much has been made of the central
control over these drone killings in the White House (under Brennan).Is there any sign that the White House would
relinquish this kind of control, or that the informal channels of governance which
tend to suborn the cabinet structure would not allow Brennan or someone else in
the White House to continue to oversee these killings?

I think that the pervasive secrecy in
this case might well have more to do with the type of war we have chosen to
fight—whichever agency is charged with leading that fight—than with shuffling
bureaucratic responsibility about.Two
presidents have now made the case to our country that a war on, of, and by terror
is necessary for our security, and the public has by and large accepted this
assertion without a peep.

Last semester, I taught discussion
sections for a class on the “History and Practise of Human Rights”.One of the guest lecturers who spoke to
students was Alexa Koenig of the Berkeley Law School, who researches, among
other things, the U.S. prison and sometime torture facility at Guantanamo
Bay.She made the point that if one
examines assassinations and abductions by governments across time, each of
those strategies tends to wax in use as the other wanes.

The point is that if we accept that it
is acceptable to wage a war of this awful nature, our government, our
intelligence agencies, and our military will find a way to do what a war of
terror requires: kill, kidnap and torture in the shadows.While this is not to say that we shouldn’t,
if the opportunity arises, seek to reduce the egregiousness of this behaviour, we
would falter in our duty if we stopped at reforming the use of drones and
failed to do our utmost to halt our unconscionable war of terror.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.